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Gender Questions Arise in Obituary of Rocket Scientist and Her Beef Stroganoff

By Margaret Sullivan April 1, 2013 4:12 pmApril 1, 2013 4:12 pm

Yvonne Brill’s accomplishments as a scientist made her a natural subject for a Times obituary last weekend. Those staff-written obituaries, which recognize only the tiniest fraction of people who die on a given day, are intended not as tributes but as news stories of those who lived highly distinctive lives.

When this particular obituary appeared online Saturday, though, it caused many readers to do a double-take because of its emphasis on Mrs. Brill’s domestic life.

When it initially appeared online and in the first print edition, the first two paragraphs read as follows:

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.

But Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was also a brilliant rocket scientist who in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.

Many people responded negatively to what they saw as sexism.

Typical was this Twitter message from Aaron Bady:

Hey, ‪@Sulliview‬‬‬ what’s up with that disgraceful obituary for Yvonne Brill? “was also a brilliant rocket scientist”? For real?

Others, like Amy Alexander and Ron Charles — humorously but with an edge — wanted The Times to know how they would like to be remembered when the time comes.

Dear NYT, just in case you’re prewriting obits of obscure book critics, everybody says I make delicious chocolate chip cookies.

Amy Davidson, a senior editor at The New Yorker who writes its Close Read blog, said on Twitter that it was striking how Mrs. Brill’s “work was both mentioned and somehow invisible,” given the emphasis in the obituary. Ms. Davidson also noted that the eight years off from work apparently wasn’t entirely the case; Mrs. Brill continued to work part time as a consultant during those years, the obituary said further down.

Later on Saturday, after the flurry of negative attention, the culinary reference dropped out and some other language changed in the online version of the obituary. And when it appeared in later print editions, its first paragraph still mentioned her family life but also included her profession, and the beef stroganoff was nowhere to be found. (It’s not unusual for The Times to make changes to articles online. When a factual error is corrected, that is drawn to the reader’s attention, but otherwise, incremental changes are not generally noted.)

This didn’t satisfy everyone:

Julie Rehmeyer, a freelance science writer from New Mexico, e-mailed:

The change in the lede for Yvonne Brill’s obituary only makes it worse, in my opinion. Yes, the original reference to beef stroganoff was inappropriate in the extreme — but having any reference to her parenting or spouse in the first paragraph of her obituary is also inappropriate. Fixing the beef stroganoff reference without fixing the misguided nature of the article as a whole doesn’t solve the problem; it minimizes it through its insufficiency.

An additional problem with the article is mentioning the “Diamond Superwoman award” immediately after her National Medal of Technology and Innovation, as if the two awards were comparable.

Jennifer King, a journalism student who is studying obituaries for her master’s thesis at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, wrote to me:

I feel Mr Martin was subtly pointing out the irony of a woman in that era not only being a remarkable scientist but also a great wife and mother. The reference to her cooking was, I believe, to add context to Mrs. Brill’s extraordinary achievements in an era where women were not encouraged to be anything other than Domestic Goddesses.

Anyway, I think it has been an all ’round learning experience for everyone and has drawn attention to the art of obituary writing, which can’t be a bad thing! Best of all, while some may be critical of the obituary, at least we now all know about Yvonne Brill, which must be a positive outcome, don’t you agree?

This all may seem to be a tempest in a Crock-Pot, but it actually raises some significant questions related to gender – which is under much discussion at a time when Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” has hit the top of the nonfiction best-seller list.

When it’s highly unusual for a woman to do what she did professionally, to what extent does that merit notice? Should gender be ignored in a profile or obituary? Should it be treated as the main event?

A recent article in Columbia Journalism Review gives guidelines for writing about women in this context. Curtis Brainard quotes the science writer Christie Aschwanden, who objects to journalism about women in science that “treats its subject’s sex as her most defining detail.”

I talked to William McDonald, the obituaries editor, on Monday morning about the reaction.

“I’m surprised,” he said. “It never occurred to us that this would be read as sexist.” He said it was important for obituaries to put people in the context of their time and that this well-written obituary did that effectively. He also observed that the references in the first paragraph to cooking and being a mother served as an effective setup for the “aha” of the second paragraph, which revealed that Mrs. Brill was an important scientist.

Mr. McDonald said that he was consulted about the changes on Saturday night by editors who were working then and who believed that the negative reaction should be listened to. But, he said, he would have preferred to leave the obituary as it was.

The Times clearly would never have written about Mrs. Brill if her major accomplishments had been merely or mostly domestic, he noted. It was her role as a scientist that made the obituary worth doing, and that caused it to be displayed as the lead obituary in Sunday’s paper.

The writer, Douglas Martin, described himself as “just so full of admiration for this woman, in all respects.”

“I was totally captivated by her story,” he said, and he looked for a way to tell it in as interesting a way as possible. The negative reaction is unwarranted, he said — a result of people who didn’t read the obituary fully but reacted only to what they saw on Twitter about the opening paragraph.

It hasn’t changed his mind about how he wrote it: “I wouldn’t do anything differently.”

Here’s my take: It was fine for the obituary to point out how unusual it was for a woman to be a successful rocket scientist at midcentury and what the obstacles were.

And the way she handled her role as a wife and mother certainly had a place, given the era in which she did her work. Cultural context is important.

But if Yvonne Brill’s life was worth writing about because of her achievements, and all agree that it was, then the glories of her beef stroganoff should have been little more than a footnote.

The emphasis on her domesticity — and, more important, the obituary’s overall framing as a story about gender — had the effect of undervaluing what really landed Mrs. Brill on the Times obituaries page: her groundbreaking scientific work.

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Liz Spayd is the sixth public editor appointed by The New York Times. The public editor works outside of the reporting and editing structure of the newspaper and receives and answers questions or comments from readers and the public, principally about news and other coverage in The Times. Her opinions and conclusions are her own. Read more »